"Living Through My Mother's Breakdown"

My mother and I are on the subway, on our way back to my apartment in Brooklyn. She’s come from Philadelphia to spend the holidays with me, and it is, as it has almost always been, just the two of us. I tell her that I have decided to write about my childhood, and for the first time I say that we need to talk about those things we have never been able to discuss. “I remember that you were ill when I was a child,” I begin. “You were lost in a world that you had invented, one that didn’t really exist.” I am struggling for the words to say that she had slipped into madness. “Do you remember that?” I ask. In the face of my anxiety, she is calm.

The train hurtles through the tunnels, and I feel as though I have entered a similar maze. I forge ahead. “I want you to think about whether it’s OK for me to reveal those things. You can decide that it isn’t.” “It’s all right with me,” she says almost offhandedly. I’m not sure that I believe her. Although she is completely, miraculously recovered, I am afraid to expose her secrets.

Later that night she comes into my room and sits on the edge of the bed. “You have my blessing,” she says. “Write whatever you are inspired to write.” She’s 74 now, still so pretty, and I am reminded of her strength and generosity. At that moment I remember that I am able to tell this story because I am the daughter of a remarkable woman.

Just the two of us

By the time I was born, when my mother was 40, she’d already lived a full life. She was ambitious and bright, had put herself through college at 30 years old in 1963, before that was an acceptable thing for women her age to do. My father left when I was a toddler, but she filled the gap of his absence so completely that I didn’t think about him much, except when kids in school asked where he was.

When I was six she married Phillip, a man from her old neighborhood, in a cramped apartment in front of friends of his we’d never seen before. Within weeks of our move to his condo in the Philadelphia suburbs, he turned violent and unpredictable. Sparked by the slightest infraction, he would rip through the apartment with insults and threats. He’d lean in until his face was inches from hers, and then raise his fist just to see her flinch. Sometimes he didn’t drop his fist, and that meant that I had to bang on neighbors’ doors until one of them let me in to call 911.

After a few months Phillip tired of us, hustled us into his car in the middle of the night and drove to a bus station. My mother, crying rasping sobs that shook her shoulders, begged him not to leave us there. He opened the car doors, and the world came rushing in all at once—the fog, the desolate parking lot, the lateness of the hour. My mother must have seen my terror because she stopped crying, smoothed her hair and smiled. “Come on, honey pie,” she said. “We’ll call Grandmom and Grandpop.”

We lived with my grandparents in New Jersey for several months. My mother eventually reconciled with Phillip, but his violence made it impossible to stay more than another year. Determined to make a fresh start, we boarded a bus bound for California. I knew we were running away and that everything was spinning out of control, but there was something thrilling in the journey, as though we could do anything. But that too was short-lived. She couldn’t find work in Oakland, and we returned to my grandparents after three months.

Back from California, I noticed a new fragility to my mother. Even at nine I could see the change, as though my stepfather had smashed something that couldn’t be put back together. There’d never been much money, but she’d always worked. That year she stopped even looking for jobs. The things she loved, including her parents and our church, were replaced with a deep despair that lifted occasionally and only with me. We were sharing a bedroom at the back of my grandparents’ house, and on good nights, if I woke up I’d feel her breathing beside me. On bad nights, she sat by the window and prayed until dawn, confessing long lists of supposed sins, things like, “Dear Father, forgive me for not saying grace for the water I drank earlier.”

I’d watch her silhouette in the moonlight as she sat with stacks of notebook paper on her lap. Sometimes she’d feel my eyes on her, turn suddenly and stroke my hair, murmuring, “Everything is all right, sweetie,” until I fell asleep again. On those nights I had my own prayer: “Dear Father, something is wrong and nobody will fix it. Please help us.”

Her illness opened inside her like a huge, dark butterfly. Increasingly its demands encroached on her daily life. She came to believe that my grandparents were plotting against her, putting chemicals in our food to control our thoughts. She wrapped our groceries in aluminum foil and kept them in plastic bags with knotted handles. She came out of our room only to see me off to school and to cook. I hoped that the tension between my mother and grandparents would disappear, but it only grew. She told me there was a battle going on all around us, just like the one in the Bible between God and the devil. We were on God’s side, and my grandparents and everyone else were not. God had sent her an angel to protect us, and he whispered low inside her head. She called him The Voice, and he was our secret. I wasn’t sure if what she said was true, but it didn’t matter. She was my mother, everything I had in the world. I had to believe her.

Ayana and her mother, Norma, when Ayana was 10 months old

And then she was gone

One afternoon I came home from school and she wasn’t there. “Your mommy’s going to be fine,” my grandfather told me. “She’s in a special place where they help people who are sad.” I sat on the front steps and waited. Waited through the afternoon and into the twilight as my shadow grew long against the lawn and finally disappeared with the first stars. Waited though my grandparents explained that she wouldn’t be back that night or the next. Was it my fault, I wondered; had she been taken away because I hadn’t believed in her enough? The word sick had been used, but I knew her illness was something that could not be measured in blood or bandages.

We went to see her at the hospital. A man in a white coat led my grandparents and me through a hallway of locked doors that buzzed open and then slammed shut behind us. My memories of the visit are brief. Her smile: hopeful, humiliated, pleased to see me. Her hands: folded in her lap, sluggish as she lifted them to embrace me. When it was time to go, she turned to my grandmother and whispered, “Don’t leave me here.” But Grandmom shook her head and hurried me out into the hallway. I looked back at my mother through the rectangle of glass in the steel door. She was standing where we’d left her, tears running down her face, her hand paused in midwave, fingers splayed.

History repeats itself

After about a month she came home. Surely there had been a diagnosis, but no one told me. At 34 I am still unable to name this thing that shaped our lives so profoundly. Whatever it was, the hospital didn’t cure her. Being admitted against her will had only confirmed her belief that it was the two of us against the world. One afternoon soon after her release, I returned from school in tears because some kids had called me chubby. She covered me with kisses and said, “You’re beautiful; it’s just a little baby fat. We’ll go for walks and it’ll disappear. Besides, it’s not your fault.” When I asked what she meant, she whispered, “They put things in your food.” I didn’t tell her about the candy bars and extra sandwiches that I’d been sneaking, or that in her absence I’d binged nearly to the point of vomiting because that made it easier to face our empty bedroom.

I was a bridge between my mother and the world, an envoy. But it was a role that left me frazzled, confused and even resentful. At times I was fiercely protective; other times I was angry at her for our problems.

My mother grew more determined for us to be on our own. Inside the chaos of her illness, she found a place of quiet strength and began looking for an apartment and a job, planning a new life for us. Three years after our arrival at my grandparents’, we moved to a little town in South Jersey where she worked as an office assistant during the day and did data processing at night. She was rarely home. In the evenings I watched television or talked on the phone with friends from school. I was almost 13, and it was my first glimpse of independence, of what it could mean to understand the world from my own perspective.

That spring Phillip reappeared. This time, he promised, would be different. He’d bought a house just outside of Philadelphia where, he said, we would live as a family. I don’t know why my mother went back to him, but within a month he’d exiled her from their bedroom because he “couldn’t stand to look at” her. Summer came, and I was nervous about starting high school in the fall. “What if I don’t fit in?” I asked my mother one afternoon as we were coming home from a walk. As we entered the front door, my stepfather appeared at the top of the stairs holding two garbage bags. ”This is my house!” he bellowed. ”You two have to get out.” He tossed the bags down the steps and my clothes, balled up inside, spilled out. “You have 15 minutes.”

He drove us to a motel in the city, handed my mother $50 and was gone. We stayed there that night and the next. When the money ran out, we left our things with the desk clerk and spent the night on a bench across the street from a gas station. In the still hours before dawn, as people slept cocooned in their houses, I wondered why we mattered so little. How could we be so inconsequential that we were abandoned to the night and the streets? At sunrise we went to a nearby McDonald’s, and while I had breakfast my mother pretended she wasn’t hungry, though neither of us had eaten since the previous afternoon. That day marked the first of nearly four years of moving from place to place—this one’s den, that one’s foldout couch, a shelter and then a series of rented rooms and shabby apartments.

Teenage rebellion

It was also at that time that The Voice returned, telling my mother the same things as before: We were on God’s side in a world of evil; no one could be trusted; there were listening devices in our apartment so “They”—our family, the neighbors, everyone—could hear us talking; something had been implanted in her molars as a way to control her thoughts. She couldn’t hold a steady job, and we moved often because we couldn’t afford the rent, because the conditions were dangerous—in one neighborhood shots rang out nearly every night—and, most of all, because she wanted something better for us. By my seventeenth birthday we had moved 18 times.

Throughout those years, my mother refused to let our circumstances dictate my future. She made sure that I got accepted to one of the best high schools in Philadelphia. “At least we won’t have to worry about college now,” she’d say. It was the only relief I gave her. At 15 I’d been arrested for shoplifting cassette tapes. I sobbed on the way to the police station because I was frightened and humiliated, but mostly because I was ashamed— almost everything about my life felt insignificant and squalid. By the time I was 16, I was drinking, smoking and experimenting with drugs, and had run away from home. My rebellion didn’t seem to make my mother any sicker, fortunately, even when I was intentionally cruel. I had begun to know, not merely suspect as I had as a child, that her world was not the real one, and I lashed out because I wanted freedom from her delusions, our poverty and my anger. I even hated her determination, maybe because I couldn’t save her, or maybe because I was afraid that, in the end, we were damned whether she was heroic or not.

I cut my life in half—home and mother, school and friends. When I would come back to the bare walls and our few bits of furniture, her illness suffocated me, as though I was drowning in it. One Sunday evening after a weekend away, I walked in and my mother, who never bought new clothes for herself, proudly showed me the new shirt she’d gotten me. “I hate this,” I said, eyeing the pastel blue but- ton-down. I changed the subject to the upcoming SATs, something sure to make her anxious about the bugs planted in the walls. The less They knew, the better. We never spoke about anything important because my mother insisted that They made good things go bad and ruined possibilities. She turned on the water to muffle our voices. I talked over it. “Stop, Ayana, stop! Put on the television,” she said, panic edging in. “You’re insane, you know that?” I yelled. “This is bullshit!” She lowered her head, but I could still see the tears and the way she bent at the waist as though she’d been punched.

My own unraveling

At 18, I left Philadelphia and arrived at New York University believing that leaving my mother would be my salvation. Instead I fell apart. I didn’t know how to navigate the world without that daily dose of unflagging love that I had pretended to reject. We were our own country, she and I, the terrain of which I understood. I fell into a severe depression. I couldn’t go to class or to work, couldn’t even sleep. Pacing all night, I thought that if I could just make it to daybreak, I would be all right. But I wasn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t ever end, I began to think, this sensation of being trapped in the middle of a silent scream. Finally, when I realized that I might hurt myself, I found a psychiatrist. It took months of sessions for me to say aloud that my mother was mentally ill. I had carried that secret for 14 years.

There was no magic in healing, no quick fix. It was like slowly unpacking a box from the attic—find the box, open it and examine the contents one by one, blowing off the dust. Once, when I started seeing a new therapist, she told me, gently, that none of what had happened had been my fault. I answered, “Sure, I know that.” And I thought that I did. But after the session, an image of myself as a little girl popped into my mind. I was suddenly overcome with compassion for her. I walked for blocks, crying for that child who had been so afraid and ashamed. That afternoon I began to learn that while the past will always be there, it doesn’t have to hurt so much.

Amazingly, as I recovered, so did my mother. The Voice faded, and her thoughts became her own again. One night we were eating dinner in her apartment and I realized that we were speaking freely, no faucets turned on full blast, no television at high volume. As our lives became more livable, we grew closer, bonded by our past. She was the only person who knew what it was to have experienced my life. In her there was an archive in which I could always find myself A couple of years ago I took her to the ballet for Mother’s Day. When it was over, she confessed she’d been nervous because everyone was moneyed and, she thought, somehow superior. I reminded her of when I was a teenager and dating a wealthy boy who invited me to a family party. The mere thought of going made me feel inadequate, but my mother was emphatic: “You belong wherever you choose to go.” As we left the performance, I teased her about not taking her own advice. She stopped mid- stride and said, “All I ever wanted was for you to be the best person that you could be—to be self-assured and strong. And look at you now. You’re better than I could have imagined.”

These days I sometimes worry about her; there isn’t much money and she’s retired. But she’s still strong and manages, most of the time, to fight depression when it comes, to find comfort in the beautiful things in the world. Recently she called me because PBS was airing a concert of Strauss waltzes, and we watched it together while on the phone. “It makes you feel like there couldn’t ever be anything wrong in the world,” she said. I’d often wondered if the pressures of raising me had precipitated her plunge into illness, and if she’d gotten better because she no longer had that responsibility. And so as Strauss played in the background, I finally found the courage to ask her if it had been my fault, if it had all been too much. “Ayana,” she answered, “you were my strength. You were everything I had.”

I remember standing in the parking lot where my stepfather left us when I was seven, the cold air on my face, the smell of gasoline, my mother’s arm around my shoulders, and how I thought that we had better hold on to each other tightly or we’d be lost. We’ve been holding on all these years. And we survived.